Eating is a necessary part of life. The body needs fuel (e.g., food) to function and operate properly. This need for fuel is often expressed in the hunger urge. The hunger urge drives consumers to eat (e.g., consume calories). However, consumers eat for a variety of reasons other than satisfying their hunger. For example, consumers may eat simply for the purpose of being social. Indeed, eating has become a social activity and food has become deeply intertwined with social interaction. This leads consumers to eat more when they are with others who are eating. Advertising has also led to an increase in the consumption of food. In addition to the many promotional reasons for eating, consumers may also use eating as a coping mechanism for dealing with negative emotion (e.g., stress, depression, etc.). As a result consumers often overeat. Overeating, coupled with lifestyle behaviors that are increasingly sedentary, has led to epidemic numbers of consumers being overweight and/or obese.
These negative trends have resulted in increased attention to becoming health conscience. Approaches for becoming healthy (e.g., maintaining a healthy weight) include increasing the number of calories that are burned (through exercise, for example) and/or limiting the number of calories that are consumed (by calorie tracking, for example). Tracking calories has proven to be a difficult problem. Current calorie trackers require consumers to manually enter all of the calories that they consume. This means that each time the consumer eats they must figure out how many calories they are eating and enter that information into the calorie tracker. Often, the process of manually entering calorie information becomes so tedious that consumers lose interest and stop tracking the calories they consume. In another approach, calories may be tracked by only eating the items that are provided to the consumer as part of a specially prepared diet. While this approach allows for exact tracking of calorie intake, the specially prepared meals take away the spontaneity and many of the social aspects of eating. Furthermore, it is difficult for consumers to limit their eating to the specially prepared meals when they are constantly surrounded with food and/or social settings that include food.